It starts on a plane to Singapore in 1989. IRA man Francis O’Neill and his wife, Bridget, are on a break to see old friends living the good life abroad. Francis is an IRA killer in the tradition of IRA killers in fiction, driven, we are told, by hatred. But there is hope for Bridget, who is not, it seems, driven by the same impulse. British operative Sarah befriends the lonesome Bridget. The trap is set; the game is on.

To defeat terrorists we have to get inside their minds | Nicholas Searle

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Bridget is stuck in a loveless marriage to a man she once considered charismatic. She intended to go to college but it didn’t work out. She wants things from life: like others in the republican hinterland, she needs to be led from the mess they have created for themselves by kindly, rational if stern English operatives. This novel is the follow-up to Nicholas Searle’s acclaimed 2015 debut The Good Liar, and the technical aspects of thriller writing are well handled, as Bridget compromises herself further and further and the tension of operations builds on both sides.

The book is split into nine sections, covering the period from 1989 to 2005, the years of peacemaking. The author is apparently a former intelligence man, but the moral and physical terrain of Ireland is half grasped. Searle’s thesis is that paramilitaries start out as misguided idealists and end up in disillusioned middle age, longing to get out and becoming ripe for the picking by a smooth-talking intelligence type. But this is an infiltration technique, not a moral position.

Searle writes well on what he knows about when describing police offices that “seemed to will your undoing”, or the sterile spaces of Belmarsh prison. The conversations between spooks seem convincing – although you wish they didn’t – and the dialogue is crisp but slips into caricature when the Irish are talking to each other. When you strip the story away, the Irish characters are a sorry lot: psychopaths, fanatics, alcoholics, traitors, self-haters– racial parodies from the 19th century updated.

There are political and emotional truths in here. Young men and women have their lives destroyed. The big players do survive and prosper. But the reader can’t avoid the subtext: you Irish brought this on yourselves, and we are here to rescue you from your own violent nature.

Reviewers compare Searle to Le Carré, but Le Carré understands the nature of a spy’s calling: that they are sin eaters

We don’t get the normal disclaimer at the start of the novel. Instead we are told that similarities between this story and the activities of real people are “neither intended nor mere coincidence, but unavoidable”, whatever that is supposed to mean. You could match many of the principal players in the novel to real figures in the IRA; operations described could be mapped on to real operations.

The mission to subvert the IRA goes on. Francis’s weak younger brother is drawn in and discarded brutally by both sides. Francis himself will be compromised and Bridget will discover loyalties she did not know she possessed. The leading republican player is “Gentleman Joe” Geraghty, a smooth talking but ruthless and amoral commander. His opponent, British intelligence field officer Richard Mercer, is of course thoughtful and analytical. There is a maimed grotesque of an RUC commander, but for the main part Protestants are absent, as is any mention of the security services’ relationship with loyalist paramilitaries. Searle tells us that his former employers did not attempt to impede his novel, and it is hard to see what they might object to.

What became of the north of Ireland in the last century is a labyrinth. It is the Nietzschean abyss. As you gaze into it, it will gaze into you. No one is immune from what happened, no one is absolved, and the security services were main players from the start. Reviewers have compared Searle to John le Carré, but Le Carré always understands the nature of a spy’s calling: that they are, at best, sin eaters. When you are in the shadows you do not walk upright; you slink.

The end page acknowledgments contain an ill-judged homily on the futility of political violence. Coming from a former member of the security establishment, it is a head in the hands moment. Can his incomprehension be so vast?

• Eoin McNamee’s Blue trilogy is published by Faber. A Traitor in the Family by Nicholas Searle (Viking, £14.99). To order a copy for £12.74, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.